About

I collect things. Ancient coins, postage stamps, anime ratings, arcade high scores, audiobook hours, the pins on a map of everywhere I've been. And somewhere along the way I noticed that every collection I keep eventually turns into software. That's the most honest way I know to introduce myself: I'm a software engineer whose hobbies keep filing feature requests, and I keep closing the tickets.

Where I'm from

I grew up in Chennai, South India, which mostly explains my permanent inability to be impressed by anyone else's summer. I studied Electronics & Communication at Anna University, realized the part I loved was the software, and followed that to a master's in Computer Science and Software Engineering at UT Dallas. I've been building for the web ever since.

What I do for a living

The through-line of my career is simple: I build the tools that let other people ship.

After a few early web-development roles, I spent the better part of a decade at Dealer.com (Cox Automotive), going from UI Engineer to Senior UI Engineer. Most of that time went into internal developer tooling and scaffolding generators, the unglamorous plumbing that turns "we should build this" into "it's in staging." This was before AI, when a generator was something you wrote by hand and defended in code review. Since 2022 I've been a Senior Software Engineer at Iterable, same instinct, different scale.

Those generators have a direct descendant: packkit, my own scaffolding tool. Same itch, far more leverage.

If you want the one-page version, download my résumé (PDF).

The app orchestra

Here's how I think about my work now, and I'll say it plainly because it matters.

I don't see myself as someone who hand-writes every line. I see myself as someone who builds whole applications to close real gaps: deciding what should exist, shaping it, wiring it together, and making sure it ships. An orchestrator more than a soloist. I've started calling it my app orchestra, which is a little grand for what is mostly me and a laptop, but the name stuck.

A lot of my personal work is AI-collaborated, and I say that with a straight face and no apology. What used to stop a domain expert from building the software they wished existed was the sheer cost of the first thousand lines. That barrier has dropped. I still bring the judgment: what's worth building, what "done" means, where the sharp edges are, and when the model is confidently wrong. But the leverage is real, and pretending otherwise would be the least honest thing on this page.

The obsessions, and what they became

This is the part I actually wanted to write. My projects are less a portfolio than a self-portrait: each one is a hobby that got out of hand.

• Retro games. I grew up on Mario and Contra — the 8-bit console kind, since arcade cabinets never really made it to my corner of Chennai — and never really left. So I built Retroix, a from-scratch game engine with a shelf of games on top, because an engine with no games is just an elaborate way to draw a rectangle.
• Travel. My location history was sitting in an export nobody looks at. droppin and waypoints turn that into maps I actually want to show people, without handing my whereabouts to anyone else.
• Audiobooks. I listen to an absurd number of them. earshot reads my Audible library and gives me a year-in-review, because Spotify shouldn't have all the fun.
• Anime. I am a serious MyAnimeList user, the way some people are serious about wine. The anime suite is a year-in-review, a keyboard-fast bulk-rater for the backlog I'm slightly ashamed of, and a sync that keeps my watch history honest.
• Coin collecting. Ancient and world coins — a habit I picked up this year that got out of hand and became Numistoria: a museum that tells one connected story across twenty “worlds”, the couple dozen I actually own shelved next to the hundreds I am still hunting, each with its own page.
• Stamp collecting. I have over 100,000 stamps, which is not a typo and not a cry for help. It is, however, a cataloguing problem, so I'm building PhilatelyOS, using AI vision to identify and catalogue the whole thing. Along the way I shipped a stamp-grader that tells you honestly how well-centered your stamp is, even when you'd rather it lied.
• Personal finance. I wanted to know whether my investing ideas were any good before my money found out. Divvy is a backtester pointed at my real portfolio. It has been humbling.

Why any of this matters

If you're thinking about working with me, here's the one thing to take away.

The person who deals with a 100,000-stamp backlog by building a vision pipeline, or who wants a year-in-review and just writes the thing, is the same person who shows up at work. I notice the gap, decide it should be closed, and build the tool, carefully, with an eye for the sharp edges and whatever leverage is available. The hobbies aren't a footnote on the resume. They're the evidence.

Thanks for reading this far. Go look at the coins; they're the best part.